Seamus Heaney (1939 – 2013) was the eldest child of nine born to a farming family in County Derry, Northern Ireland. He won a scholarship to St Columb’s College, Derry, beginning an academic career that would lead, through Queen’s University…

George Mackay Brown (1921-1996) was born in the remote Orkney Islands off the north coast of Scotland and apart from two periods of education at Newbattle Abbey College and the University of Edinburgh, he lived there all his life. The…

John Burnside (b. 1955 – d. 2024) was the author of fourteen collections of poetry and eleven works of fiction, as well as three uncompromising memoirs. He achieved wide critical acclaim in his lifetime, winning the Whitbread Poetry Award in…

Gillian Clarke (b. 1937) is one of the central figures in contemporary Welsh poetry, the third to take up the post of National Poet of Wales. Her own poems have achieved widespread critical and popular acclaim (her Selected Poems has…

Penelope Shuttle (b. 1947) has made her home in Cornwall since 1970 and the county’s mercurial weather and rich history are continuing sources of inspiration. So too is the personal and artistic union Shuttle shared with her husband, the poet…

Patricia Beer (1924-1999) was born in Exmouth, Devon, into a Plymouth Brethren family, a childhood she recalls vividly in her autobiography Mrs Beer’s House. Educated at Exmouth Grammar School, Exeter University and Oxford, she lived in Italy lecturing in English…

Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967) was born into a wealthy Anglo-Jewish family and his early life was comfortable and leisured, dominated by sports and country pursuits. However, his poetic leanings were present even during this carefree period: the young Siegfried loved books…

Kevin Crossley-Holland (b. 1941) grew up with a passion for history, encouraged by a father who recited folk tales to his son, accompanying himself on a Welsh harp. The young Kevin was so entranced by the medieval and ancient past…

Kathleen Jamie spent much of her early poetic career answering the question posed by the disapproving elders in her famous poem ‘The Queen of Sheba’: “whae do you think y’ur?” Across a rich and varied body of writing, Jamie has…

Ruth Padel (b. 1947) has won the National Poetry Competition and written six collections of poetry, several shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot or Whitbread Prize; taught Greek at Oxford, sung in an Istanbul nightclub, is a Fellow of the Royal…

Michael Rosen (b. 1946) says he became a children’s poet by accident – “I thought I was being an ironic adult poet but children’s literature ‘claimed’ me”. He has since become a very well-known poet, for adults as well as…

Jean Sprackland (b. 1962) is the author of five collections of poems and, in Strands, a series of haunting and evocative meditations prompted by walking on wild, estuarial beaches in the northwest of England. She has been shortlisted for the Forward Prize…

Jenny Joseph (b. 1932 – d. 2018) was originally from Birmingham but her first remembered home was in leafy Buckinghamshire. She read English at St Hilda’s College Oxford. A variety of occupations included being a newspaper reporter, lecturer in language…

Brendan Kennelly (b. 1936 – d.2021) was the prolific author of over twenty books of poetry as well as plays, novels and criticism. Born in Ballylongford in Co. Kerry, Kennelly was Professor of Modern Literature at Trinity College, Dublin for…

Andrew Motion read English at Oxford University where he won the Newdigate Prize and studied the work of Edward Thomas, an abiding influence. At Hull University he taught English and worked alongside Philip Larkin, another acknowledged mentor, whose official biographer…

Michael Hamburger (1924 – 2007) was born into a German family of Jewish descent in Berlin, emigrating with them to England in 1933. He attended Westminster School and read Modern Languages at Christ Church, Oxford where his contemporaries included Philip…

Les Murray (1938 – 2019) grew up the only son of poor farmers in a remote valley in New South Wales. It was a hard background but one that instilled in him a love of the landscape and people of…

Ian Duhig (b. 1954) was the eighth of eleven children born to Irish parents with a liking for poetry. He has won the National Poetry Competition twice, and also the Forward Prize for Best Poem; his collection, The Lammas Hireling,…